Clan With a Plan

With St. Patrick’s Day just over the horizon, and the sun lightening the sky and the spirits of Syracusans, it couldn’t get much better for the 2,300 plus runners who took to the streets around Tipperary Hill on Saturday, March 6, for the fifth annual Shamrock Run, a hilly four-mile jaunt that nearly always seems to fall on the loveliest of hint-of-springtime days.

A solid half-dozen bands and choirs of all ages lifted their voices into the late morning sky as the runners, some of them serious enough to be dreaming of prize money at the end of the rainbow, and others silly enough to be encumbered by green necklaces and fake red leprechaun beards, circled around and cut through Burnet Park, chugged past the open doors of at least a dozen ale houses and pubs, converging for a finale of bagels and bananas, massages and coffee, at the ice rink atop the hill.

For a middle-of-the-pack runner and a decidedly over-the-hill beer drinker (spare me the green dye, Peter Coleman), it seemed for more than an instant that life couldn’t get much better. And then it did. I was chugging along with Mike Sullivan, longtime proprietor of the Oxford Inn, when just ahead of us on the hill, a lovely lass held a steady pace and wore a T-shirt emblazoned on the back with “Cahill Clan Pub Crawl.” It turns out that this woman, Kathleen Cahill of Manlius, belongs to a clan that holds family reunions in the old sod, and what’s more, they make their gatherings into an excuse for that most refined of Irish drinking traditions—the pub crawl.

Nothing against the backyard barbecue, but this crawl, it turns out, involves 61 people making the rounds of pubs in Killarney and the western shores of Ireland, including Galway, the Cliffs of Mohr and Doolin, where some of Ireland’s finest traditional music can be seen and heard.

The Cahill Clan Pub Crawl tour departs from Syracuse on April 20 in a Caz Limo bus, then takes off from Kennedy Airport in New York City, landing in Shannon to begin a week of tasting and touring that includes a chance to kiss the Blarney Stone and to down a pint or two in a pub named, coincidentally, Cahill’s. The tour group even spends a night lodged like royalty in the Bunratty Castle Hotel after a day crossing the rugged landscape known as the Burren.

Marty Cahill, a Manlius resident and employee benefits consultant, went to Ireland two years ago with his mother Mary Lou and sister Kathleen. They had hitched on to a tour group out of Connecticut. He decided it would be a nifty idea for a family reunion.

“We had a ball,” said Cahill, a partner in the firm of Locey & Cahill, “but the group was the biggest bunch of stiffs we’d ever met. So we decided that we would go back with a group of friends and family.” The only criterion for inclusion in the trip, he said, “is that we wanted PLUs {people like us}, and you can’t be a PITA {pain in the ass}.” Drinking is not a requirement.

The Cahills announced the plan last year on St. Patrick’s Day, and it was so successful that it sold out; they even donated a pair of tickets to be raffled off as a fund-raiser for the Syracuse Irish Festival last September. That raffle, won by Syracuse resident Jennifer Hardwich, generated nearly $6,000 for the Irish Festival and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The group includes a pair of 21-year-old barmaids from Manlius and retirees in their 70s. They will return from Ireland on April 26, with tales to tell.